He had gone; he
had left her; perhaps she would never see him or hear of him again. Then
the place grew hateful to her and terrible as a grave. She dragged herself
away, dizzy, weary, wretched; and not until half way home again did she
find power to steady her mind and control thought. Then the old alarm
returned--that first fear which had pictured him dead, perhaps even now
rolling over and over under the precipices, or hid forever in the cranny of
some dark cavern at the root of the cliffs, where high tides spouted and
thundered and battered the flesh off his bones against granite. She
suffered terribly in mind upon that homeward journey. Her own light and
darkness mattered nothing now, and her personal and selfish fears had
vanished before she reached Newlyn. She was thinking how she should raise
an alarm, how she should tell his friends, who possibly imagined "Mister
Jan" safe and comfortable in his cow-byre. But who were his friends and how
should she approach them without such a step becoming known and getting
talked about? Her misery was stamped on her face when she at last returned
to the white cottage at three o'clock in the afternoon of that day, and
Mrs. Tregenza saw it there.
"God save us! wheer you bin to, an' what you bin 'bout? You'm so pasty an'
round-eyed as if you'd bin piskey-led somewheers. An' me worn to death wi'
work. An' wheer'm the nattlins an' the basket?"
Joan had quite forgotten her commission and left the basket on Gorse Point.
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